Tuesday Reviewsday: ThunderCats (2011)

 

We're drowning in fantastic animation. In the age of Avatar, Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts, Voltron: Legendary Defender, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power you're easily forgiven the sin of overlooking the excellent 2011 ThunderCats series. After all, it hasn't been on any streaming service as far as I know.

Recently added to Hulu, the 2011 series was planned for 52 episodes but tragically cut in half when the toy sales failed to meet expectations. I don't use the word "tragic" lightly considering how good the 26 episodes were I wish the studio could have finished their tale. I hold no nostalgia for the original series and this series grabbed me by the throat. The stakes are high, the animation fluid, the voice acting is top notch, and the characters draw you in. In the alternate world where the 2011 ThunderCats reached its conclusion, we might praise it as effusively as Avatar: the Last Airbender.

Both ThunderCats (1985) and ThunderCats (2011) are streaming on Hulu right now.

Review: Codex Dark 2 and Doom Patrol

 Codex is a monthly pdf zine published by The Gauntlet, a roleplaying community and podcast network. Codex is an anthology of small RPGs, supplementary materials, and miscellany centered around a particular theme that has been tied together with use of a color palette and clever graphic design. The free sample issue rotates, and this month's issue is a really good one, so grab it while you can because the games are delightful.

The star of the current is Ghost Drums, a short horror game by Gerrit Reininghaus inspired a Guatemalan ghost story. I can't really say anything else about it without giving away too much, but I am hyped to run this with the Minions in the future and, hopefully, turn it into a limited series podcast. This issue also has the rules for Trophy and a sample adventure, a dark fantasy game about flint-eyed scoundrels plunging into a wilderness that doesn't want them there and won't let them leave. Think of it as what might happen if your OSR play-through of Keep on the Borderlands turned into the Texas Chainsaw Massacre about two-thirds of the way through. Trophy also echoes the thesis of our current limited-series, Tales from the Old Man's Bar™, Don't be surprised if you see Trophy show up on our feed down the line as well.

Both games highlight a subtle shift in design philosophy: rather than playing to find out what happens, the party is playing to find out how it happens. The ending is never in doubt - you're all going to end up turned into sausage; however, the shape and texture of the grinder is flexible. Do you end up bratwurst or chorizo? I expect we'll see more horror games take similar approaches going forward because a strong framework provides a solid foundation for play.

UPDATE: Codex Dark 2 is no longer the freely available issue. Now it's Codex Gold which contains the rules for Trophy Gold. Also an excellent game, which can be found here.

In a similar vein, our present saturation of superhero stories reveals a rhyming pattern - the heroes will triumph at the end but how they'll triumph is the real question. Do they lose a loved one? Do they sacrifice themselves? Does a city get leveled? Do they find family along the way? DC Universe's Doom Patrol takes advantage of our foreknowledge to get weird - like really weird. If you're familiar with the Patrol, then that shouldn't come as a surprise to you. However, if you're new to the team, buckle up.

The show makes nods to the larger DC Universe, but quickly leaves the familiar world of flying strongmen and billionaire vigilantes behind in favor of extra-dimensional snow globes, doomsday prophet cockroaches, boys from Brazil, and a sentient street. Despite the high weirdness, though, the show doesn't divorce or alienate the characters from their humanity. If anything, the intense contrast heightens their all-too human frailties resulting in a satisfying drama.

Anyway, I know people hate spoilers so I'll just say this - Doom Patrol has consistently been one of my favorite comics and the show does not disappoint.

Check it out when you get the chance!
 

Meat Pinata

School has me busy and a bit scatterbrained.  Random things keep falling out of my ears, maybe these baubles interest you.  Maybe they don't.

In Fragged Empire news, the Protagonist Archive will be coming along soon-ish with four new races.  One of them is the Palantor are the last true remnants of humanity:, digitized from their meat bodies, uploaded in Minecraft for millenia, and infugees downloaded into robot bodies fleeing the Mechonids.  They are going to have a Japanese naming convention and definitely represent the furthest transhuman edge of the game's technology.  A reddit thread expanding some of it here.

Swords and Stitchery put together a fantastic table detailing what you find inside a vacuum frozen corpse.  My favorite is number 6 - "A classic walk man with a Back To The Future soundtrack tape within."  There should always be weird things floating in the Black, update it to the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack if there's younger players.  You can find that here.

Finished Priest, Matthew Colville's first novel, it's equal parts The Big Sleep and the Fisher King in a D&D influenced setting.  Retired priest Heden is charged with an off the books mission by the bishop, redeem an isolated Order of feral knights.  Nothing is what it appears, and everyone is working an angle.  There's several Green Knights, a magical sword, oaths aplenty, one good knight and a Lady of the Lake to boot.  If you enjoy modern crime fiction in other times and places you'll enjoy it.

Picked up the first three issues of Dan Abnett's new cosmic Marvel series Guardians of Infinity.  For $4.99 I'd like to get one whole issue of a single story, rather crippling Abnett's ability to tell a complete story with an obnoxious back up story.  In typical Abnett fashion the story starts small and gets larger.  This time it's a space fortress that cuts across multiple timelines and there are three teams of Guardians, the current team (2000), the classic team (3000), & a team from the distant past (1000).  The writer is known for killing his sweethearts but with the Guardians of the Galaxy riding an all time high of mainstream recognition, the Guardians 2000 & 3000 aren't really in danger. But the Guardians 1000 feel like they are just around to get sacrificed. 

Real world weirdness: digital maps in China are slightly off as a matter of national security.
Find it here.

Finally getting in another session of my monthly lucha libre campaign, Habrá Sangre, and it'll be pretty good.  Last session ended in a cliffhanger with our intrepid heroes facing off against brujas against a stormy backdrop.  What further revelations will they discover as La Hora Cero draws near?

Inspiracion: Fragged Empire edition - Comics

My books are due for delivery this afternoon from the Fragged Empire Kickstarter, and to say I'm excited is an understatement.  Here's the elevator pitch: Farscape & Firefly's love child is the stage for Milton's Paradise Lost In Spaaaace, but this time Lucifer comes back and wages an apocalyptic war on the Gnostic custodians. After the last Archon falls, the Great Rebel departs for cosmos unknown leaving behind its genetically honed warhost of Nephilim to their own devices. Two hundred or so years later, the various species are jockeying for position and forging a future among the haunted stars.

I've been watching and reading a lot of sci-fi/space opera stuff in anticipation:

 

Descender, written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by Dustin Nguyen. Colossal robots known as "Harvesters" forcibly downsize galactic civilization, sparking a pogrom of synthetic life. A companion android, who may be the answer to big mysteries, reactivates on the mining colony turned mass grave that was once his home. Drama and suspense ensues as Tim-21 is pursued by specialized bounty hunters and various galactic polities.

Prophet, written by Brandon Graham and drawn by a rotating stable of artists.  In the far flung future, Earth is a squatters paradise for a myriad of alien species as the human race has long since faded into obscurity.  A contingency algorithm awakens John Prophet from stasis, setting him on a quest to revive the comatose Earth Empire from hidden enclaves and assert Humanity's dominance over the cosmos.  It's all very Jack Kirby + Conan + Metal Hurlant, lots of big ideas flung at the wall and stuck to each other, conceptually very dense.

Guardians of the Galaxy, written by Dan Abnett and drawn by Danny Lanning.  Undermanned, under powered, but with plenty of piss & vinegar, this underdog iteration of the Guardians are out to stymie existential threats.  Launched after the back to back Annihilation crossovers, the team includes stalwarts such as Rocket Raccoon, Starlord, Groot, Gamora and Drax as well as Marvel Cosmic deep cuts such as Quasar, Mantis, Adam Warlock and Moondragon.  This run was the basis for the 2014 film, and its definitely one of my favorites.

ODY-C, written by Matt Fraction and drawn by Christian Ward.  It's Homer's Illiad on a galactic scale, the gods are still assholes but the Achean & Trojan heroes are all women.  There are three separate plots following Odysseus, Agememnon, and Menelaus on their separate treks across wine dark space.  The first volume is solid re-skin of the core text, the second volume is where things get really weird.

Moving Pictures next.

Comics On A Bench: Harrow County

Harrow County; Written by Cullen Bunn; Art by Tyler Crook
This week Harrow County #6 hits stands and if you're a fan of horror and the Southern Gothic, you should ready it.  Writer Cullen Bunn weaves the tale of Esther,a who finds out her family, town, and life have all been a lie, and her role as inheritor of their collective guilt on the eve of her 18th birthday.  She discovers she is the rebirth of a lynched midwife/wise woman/witch named Hester, and some of the town's population were creatures of Hester's creation.  With the veil is lifted from her eyes, Esther must grapple with the misdeeds of her predecessor and the expectations of the community.  Fearing that she will follow in Hester's footsteps, the citizens take up arms to re-enact their past misdeeds and get her dead first.  This is just the first few issues, it gets darker as it goes.

Like most Southern Gothics, the themes of generational guilt and Caledonian Antisyzygy (two warring polarities of spirit in one person) are prominent, and you can tell that the writer is intimately familiar with this genre.  The passion and craft Bunn has put into the narrative will draw you in, even if you've read similar narratives before.  Tyler Crook's art pulls the whole work together, illuminating this tale of haunts and dark things in the wood with vivid terror and disquiet.  A wonderful work of modern horror dwelling in the past, that man is a monster, hands dyed black with past sins.